Gearbox: Blade Runner canned because it wouldn't sellThursday 12-Nov-2009 8:00 PM Wanted to spend 25 million dollars on it9 CommentsGearbox president Randy Pitchford has told OXM that the company turned down the chance to make a Blade Runner game because it wanted to spend 25 million dollars and didn't think it would get it back.

Advertisement:"One of my partners, Brian Martell, had Blade Runner on the list [of IPs we wanted to use]," Pitchford told us in an exclusive interview back in issue 53 of OXM. "We chased it down and we coulda had it. But that one failed on the business side, because the way we wanted to do it we wanted to spend 25 million dollars. And when you do the math on that, we weren't going to make it back."

"You're going to spend 25 million, there's another 10-15 risk just in the publishing process, and then you got another 10-15 million marketing, and we didn't think that we could make that back. So that's too bad."

Too bad indeed. We'd say that Ridley Scott's legendary film could still support a decent game, but nowadays it's unlikely to sell. Maybe Gearbox should go after the District 9 licence, that's much fresher.

BR796164 wrote:Yeah well... BR never was a promising, profiting mainstream material. We can be grateful to Westwood they had courage and skill to make one and make it good.

And I'm not convinced this studio would make a decent BR game, so maybe it's better as it is. Still, we can dream about a perfect, modern BR RPG/adventure, at least...

I agree. I don't think Blade Runner translates well into a video game, but Westwood provded me wrong. I think Westwood was an exception and they did everything right. I don't think that can be duplicated again, and I'd rather a company not risk it.

If it was a first person adventure/RPG like Deus Ex, I might think again. But at that point, you're not doing anything Deus Ex hasn't already done.